2009 MFA Artist: Talia Shabtay
Talia Shabtay's Artist Statement
I remember the first time I fell in love with painting was when I was assisting my high school art teacher to organize slides from the Baroque period. The Caravaggios particularly enraptured me. His paintings were not restricted to religious narrative, but rather they seemed to me narratives of light capable of inspiring religion. I remember seeing a projected image of The Death of the Virgin, the bold flickering of light and shadow as my eye traversed the image causing me to actually feel in my body the weight and agony of the moment depicted.
Of Caravaggio’s painting, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy asserts that that we, “See the invisible, not beyond the visible, not inside, nor outside, but right at it, on the threshold… The painting, then, lights up only one look: that of the closed eyes of the dead woman on whose eyelids all of the light falls” (Nancy, 59-60).
Painting, both a verb and a noun, will always contain embedded within it elements of both. A painting is made as much of looking, touching, and pausing as it is made of pigment and cloth. My own recent work is concerned with the visual and temporal space of the painted word. Like Caravaggio, Paul Gauguin, and Eric Fischl (bedroom paintings), I am interested in the effect the gaze has on time, space, and perception. My current obsessions are the group of words that have the ability to levitate both in the mind and off the tongue, the phrase that is between declaration and question, the physicality of a letter, and the punctuation mark that hovers in space apart from its subject.
In Look Out Your Window and I'll Be Gone, a syrupy platinum advertisement slogan, “your love has just gone platinum,” meets skywriting, and the grand motion of skywriting is translated to the intimate touch of the painted canvas. In painting the phrase, the formation of the letters became one of emergence from the surface of the painting, creating an image that suggests a moment of transition, a dissolving and solidifying at once. Just Gone, another painting in the Platinum series presents a severed version of the original slogan. The floating period near the bottom left of the painting suggesting the possibility that the rest of the phrase has floated or melted away.
Just a Glance, Nothing More and Pleasure With You are paintings based on the notion of building a moment out of a gaze. In Just a Glance, Nothing More, the words of Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut) “but I could hardly move,” appear in gold dust against a ground of graphite. The material weight implied by the gold and the reference to visibility by the graphite (form of carbon) underscores the implicit tension of the words as they are uttered, while complimenting the ephemeral quality of the glance the phrase refers to. Pleasure With You appropriates a slogan from an ad for a Showtime series as seen in a men’s magazine. The text appears as broken beams of yellowish light emerging from a blue ground. At several places in the painting, the yellow of the letterforms pierces the blue in a splinter-like fashion that is reminiscent of light forcing its way through window blinds or through the slits of the eyes.
About the Artist
Talia Shabtay is a current MFA candidate at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. Shabtay is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including OSU’s Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship and the OSU Graduate Fellowship. In 2008 she presented a research paper at The Ohio State University Graduate Conference in Comparative Studies, attended The School of Visual Arts summer residency in NYC, and presented a solo exhibition at Hopkins Hall Gallery in Columbus, OH. Shabtay received a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 2007. Born in Brooklyn, Shabtay lives and works in Columbus, OH.
